Despite innovations leading to more robust and efficient computing systems and software, the role of mainframe computing remains vital to many businesses and organizations. In most cases, mainframe computing systems that are in use today were originally implemented prior to the computing innovations of the 1980's and 1990's. However, many businesses and organizations have concluded that it would be too expensive and too intrusive to day-to-day business operations to upgrade their major systems to newer technologies. Therefore, to enable continued expansion of computing infrastructures to take advantage of newer technologies, much effort has been devoted to developing ways to integrate older mainframe technologies with newer server and component based technologies. For instance, COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. It is a legacy language in use by many organizations. Its name is an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.
A Customer Information Control System (CICS) may be an online transaction processing (OLTP) program created by IBM that, together with the COBOL programming language, has formed over the past several decades the most common set of tools for building customer transaction applications in the world of large enterprise mainframe computing. A great number of the legacy applications still in use are COBOL/CICS applications.
However, the strains on these legacy systems has increased as users demand more processing and take advantage of new tools, such as connecting to the system via the Internet. Users are demanding near real-time information and legacy systems have failed to meet the near-real time threshold of data availability. Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for increasing computing efficiency, reliability and speed within a mainframe environment.